This invention concerns an enclosure hood for electric, electronic or electromagnetic devices having a cavity accessible through an open side thereof but being closed by a covering plate at a side thereof opposite the open side.
Such casing hoods are often rectangularly-shaped and serve as coverings for, for instance, relay casings. Thus, in german Gebrauchsmuster DE-GM 89 12 130 a casing is disclosed with a pot-shaped enclosure hood, whose edge has a step-shaped recess. This step-shaped recess serves to engage a peripheral depressed area of a base plate, with the base plate being sealed to the pot-shaped enclosure hood to be water proof, in an especially beneficial way.
Furthermore enclosure, or casing, hoods are known, which have bores or pocket bores, on two sides thereof, in which suitable tool parts can engage for manipulating the enclosure hoods. Thus, for example, when an electric, electronic or electromagnetic device is mounted, parts of an automatic supply apparatus can engage in the openings or indentations of the enclosure hood and bring the enclosure hood to a position suitable for mounting it on an appropriate enclosure sub-member.
Such an enclosure hood has several disadvantages:
On the one hand the automatic supply apparatus cannot recognize the exact orientation of the casing, since the enclosure hood appears the same to the automatic supply apparatus upon a 180 degree turn thereof about an imaginary vertical axis extending through the middle of the open side.
To guarantee a faultless mounting, therefore, the interior of the enclosure hood must be either completely empty or it must have no structure which cooperates with components mounted on the sub-member (base plate) of the casing, or attachments mounted in the interior of the enclosure hood must be formed symmetrical to the above described axis.
Many enclosure hoods have in their interiors asymmetrical shapes, for example for mechanically supporting device parts mounted in the hoods undersides. With such enclosure hoods the danger exists of faulty mountings because of failure to recognize orientation.
On the other hand, several electric devices are often arranged side by side, for instance electric relays on a circuit board with relay sockets thereon. When this is the case it is detrimental, that device housings, or hoods, shaped in the known way, are not, individually, easily accessible.
Especially then, for instance when relay housings are densely arranged in two directions as often occurs in motor vehicles because of space considerations, a replacement of a relay, particularly one arranged in the middle of the relay group, can be very difficult or even impossible, since gripping points of the enclosure hoods are concealed by adjacent relays and the enclosure hoods, therefore cannot be gripped by a tool.
It is thus an object of this invention, to provide an enclosure hood, which is especially easy to manipulate, and which particularly makes possible an automatic orientation in a simple and cost effective manner.